4,000+ Pages of Walt Whitman’s Papers
This week the Library of Congress announced the addition of more than 4,000 new primary source documents to the By the People website. Those primary sources are all letters, notes, and manuscripts written by Walt Whitman. The purpose of the By the People project is to enlist the help of the public to transcribe thousands of primary source documents that are […]
Free to Use and Reuse Images of Athletes and Sporting Events
The Library of Congress is a great place to find historical pictures, drawings, and maps to use in lesson plans and classroom projects. Finding things on the Library of Congress’ website isn’t always easy if you only use the search function. But the LOC’s Free to Use and Reuse Sets make it much easier to find thematically […]
Lighthouses and Minibooks
The Library of Congress has a great collection of activities suggestions and resources for parents who are looking for educational activities they can do at home with their kids. The collection is called Resources for Family Engagement. Within this collection you will find activity kits that offer directions and ideas for making mini books at home, designing […]
Citizen DJ – A Free Tool for Remixing Music and Spoken Audio
Citizen DJ is a free tool for remixing and creating new songs from audio files that are in the public domain. The tool was developed by Brian Foo who is an Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. On the Citizen DJ website you will find large collections of audio files that are in the […]
LOC Mystery Photo Contest – A Good Test of Search Strategies
At about this time last year the Library of Congress hosted a mystery photo contest. They’re hosting another one right now. Just like last year’s contest the challenge is to identify the people in twelve pictures pulled from the library’s moving image section. Before you say, “just do a reverse image search” you should know […]
More Than 30,000 Historical Maps for Student Projects
This morning I was looking for a historical map of Mount Vernon to overlay onto Google Earth imagery. (I’m publishing a video about that later this week). I was able to find exactly what I was looking for in the historical map collection available through the Library of Congress. LOC’s online historical map collection has nearly […]
A New LOC Online Collection – Theodore Roosevelt’s Papers
I have always found Theodore Roosevelt to be one of the most fascinating characters in U.S. History. That is why I was excited this morning when I saw an email from the Library of Congress announcing the online publication of Theodore Roosevelt’s papers. The LOC’s collection of Theodore Roosevelt’s papers is divided into sixteen sections. […]
The LOC Launches the National Screening Room Online
The Library of Congress has a new online collection called the National Screening Room. The National Screening Room currently contains 287 videos. The videos are digital copies of films made in the 19th and 20th centuries. You can browse the collection by date, location of the filming, and subject. You can also search for videos […]
An Archive of Historic American Buildings and Landscapes
There was a time when navigating the website of the Library of Congress was a bit of a chore. Collections of digitized artifacts were mixed with collections that simply listed availability of artifacts. Thankfully, in recent years the LOC has made a marked improvement in the ease which you can find digitized artifacts that are […]
Chronicling America – An Archive of 2,600+ Digitized Newspapers
Chronicling America is a great resource provided by the Library of Congress. On Chronicling America you can find more than 2,600 digitized copies of newspapers printed in the United States between 1789 and 1963. You can search through the collection according to date, state in which the newspaper was published, and keyword. All of the […]
Photo Roulette – A Library of Congress Game
Photo Roulette is a fun little game from Library of Congress. The game shows you a randomly selected pictures from the LOC’s digital collections and you have to guess the year in which the picture was taken. You have ten guesses before you’re out of luck. After the submission of each guess you’re given a […]
Headlines and Heroes – A New Resource from the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress offers many excellent online resources for teachers and students. Even just following the LOC’s Twitter account will provide you with fun history facts. In fact, it was through that Twitter account that I learned about a new Library of Congress blog called Headline and Heroes: Newspaper, Comics & More Fine Print. […]
Caring for Comics – And Other Ideas for Video Projects
Earlier this week the Library of Congress Twitter account posted a link to the LOC’s reference page about the deterioration of paper. From that page I stumbled into the library’s Collections Care reference pages. Those pages are full of information about how to care for and preserve a variety of physical media including newspapers and comic […]
2000+ Recordings of Poets and Fiction Writers Reading and Discussing Their Work
A few years ago the Library of Congress published an online collection of audio recordings of poets and fiction writers reading and discussing their works. At the time of its launch the collection contain 124 recordings. Since then the collection has grown to include more than 2,000 recordings. The Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature contains recordings […]
Reminder – The Library of Congress Seeks a Teacher-in-Residence
Last month the most visited post on this blog was the announcement that the Library of Congress is seeking a teacher-in-residence for the 2018-19 school year. Applications for the program are due by next Monday, April 9th. The 2018-19 Teacher-in-Residence program is open for applications from visual and performing arts teachers in the United States. […]
Echoes of the Great War – Online WWI Exhibition
Echoes of the Great War is a fantastic collection of videos, audio recordings, and pictures about WWI. This online exhibition created by the Library of Congress. Echoes of the Great War is arranged thematically. Those four themes are Arguing Over War, Over Here, Over There, and World Overturned. Within each of those themes you will […]
18 Sets of Free to Use and Reuse Pictures and Videos
The Library of Congress is a great place to find a lot of media that is in the public domain. The only problem with finding material on the LOC’s website is just that, it’s often hard to find. In an attempt to begin to remedy that situation the Library of Congress has started to publish […]
Library of Congress Congressional Data Challenge
The National Data Challenge from the Library of Congress is a competition that is asking “citizen coders” to develop creative ways to use technology to analyze, visualize, and interpret data sets from congress.gov as well as other platforms. The idea is to create a product that helps others discover, use, and explore the massive collection of legislative […]
Library of Congress: Papers of Ulysses S. Grant Now Online
The Library of Congress has just put the papers of Ulysses S. Grant online for the first time in their original format. The collection of over 50,000 items that date back to 1819, was digitized from microfilm scans. The papers from the 18th president of the United States, include family correspondence, reports, military records, scrapbooks, […]
A Great Journal for History Teachers
The Library of Congress has quite a number of great resources for teachers and students. The Student Discovery Sets are favorite amongst my favorite resources that I’ve featured in the past. That collection of resources was recently updated by the LOC. The recent additions to the Student Discovery Sets include iBooks about the New Deal, scientific […]